The present invention relates to video encoding/decoding, and more particularly, to a count table maintenance apparatus for maintaining (e.g., dynamically updating) a count table in a storage apparatus during processing of a frame and a related count table maintenance method.
The conventional video coding standards generally adopt a block based coding technique to exploit spatial and temporal redundancy. For example, the basic approach is to divide the whole source frame into a plurality of blocks, perform intra prediction/inter prediction on each block, transform residues of each block, and perform quantization and entropy encoding. Besides, a reconstructed frame is generated in a coding loop to provide reference pixel data used for coding following blocks. For certain video coding standards, in-loop filter(s) may be used for enhancing the image quality of the reconstructed frame.
The video decoder is used to perform an inverse operation of a video encoding operation performed by a video encoder. For example, an entropy encoder in the video encoder is used to generate an encoded bitstream, while an entropy decoder in the video decoder is used to decode the encoded bitstream. The arithmetic coding may be employed by the entropy encoder. Hence, the entropy encoder refers to a probability table to perform the entropy encoding, and the video decoder also refers to the same probability table to perform the entropy decoding. Since the video content is inherently non-stationary in nature, adaptation of the probability table to account for changing statistics is critical in each of the video encoder and the video decoder.